


[...]

by Ealasaid



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Dissociation, Gen, Implied/Referenced Torture, PTSD RECOVERY, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Torture, Unreliable Narrator, WIP
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-16
Updated: 2015-10-19
Packaged: 2018-04-04 16:19:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 19,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4144395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ealasaid/pseuds/Ealasaid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>He runs from the living and the dead. </i>
</p><p>Max wanders, after Citadel.</p><p>[Post Fury Road; Max travels the Wasteland. Shit happens. PTSD fucks things up.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. ...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [10/19/15] Heads-up: I write this fic in the throes of PTSD formed in a hot, desert environment, with daily implications/threat of sexual assault, and paranoia that one wrong move could somehow fuck up international relations (without actually being a diplomat). A lot of this is written based on personal reflection and alcohol-fueled writing sprees. If that isn't sufficient warning, the tags above are... the baseline for what is involved.

I.

She is angry with him. “Where’re you going, Max?” she demands. “Where’re you going?”

It is too loud, here. He pushes through the crowd, shoulders stiff and belly burning with tension, tension like a ratcheted spring, tension that tightens with every jostle and bump of the crowd. Too much, too much, too close too loud too many, too _much_. It is painfully startling, a realization that it had been absent. He had not noticed when it eased, but his head pounded with the force of it now.

The shrieking cacophony of the crowd blends with her words as she screams at him. It is too close. He knows that once, he wished she would go away. It has been a long time since he had even considered anything other than that her presence was unending. His ears hurt. He wishes instead that she was not screaming at him.

The wind takes up where the crowd left off as he enters the sun. The Wasteland greets him in the usual way. The air does not smell of gasoline.

He needs something to drive. His car is gone. The tension transmutes itself into _go, go home_ and the crunch of small bones, hot metal and the smell of baked, decaying upholstery. He tastes the dust on his tongue but he does not have a wheel in his hands.

His ears echo. She screams at him, her face flickering into her bones long stripped, cleaned by the desert; the desert where she died and he has not. “Where’re you going, Max? Where—where—where’re you going?”

 _Fire,_ he thinks. _Fire and blood._ There are vehicles in a cavern carved in rock, the pride of the Citadel. There are the war machines. His car was there, but now it is not. The skeletal War Boys are not there to stop him from taking one of theirs.

II.

He waits. He knows from the days he spent in the iron cage that the Citadel quiets during the early morning hours. It will be safest to enter the cavern of the Citadel then. He sits in a tumble of debris that does not house one of the People Below and tries to ignore her. Eventually she stops screaming at him, and it becomes easier to pretend she is not there.

He does not like thinking about… things. He does not want to think about the past few days. It is hard to think of nothing. He can keep his hands busy sorting pebbles of various sizes, but it does not stop him from thinking of the pouch of marbles she had been given, scavenged from the ruins of a toy store. Tracing patterns in the dirt turns into pictures made from a child’s afternoon of finger painting, pinned to a refrigerator door with magnets. Trying to etch hypothetical engineering designs for a new car sours the time by reminding him of how he was hunted and his car stolen from him. Of how it died, wrecked to scrap metal in the race to the collapsible arch. It had been an anchor to a life that had been better. She did not care that it was destroyed and rolled her eyes when he asked about it, but he remembered how she’d looked sitting in the passenger seat watching the unchanging vista as they drove.

That was unpleasant. He hit at the rocks he hid in until his fatigue was exhaustion, capacity to think driven away by a lack of caloric intake and excess of physical exertion.

Twilight quenches the flaming sky slowly. He naps, and startles awake at every fragment of conversation that drifts by and skitter of scree knocked from the sides of the earthen pillars. She is there behind his eyelids, humming lullabies and bleeding out under the unforgiving sun. He finally moves from his place when the restlessness gets to be too much.

He skulks in the shadows. The wide area between the cultivated pillars of rock is littered with people, the remnants of the celebration of the death of a despot. He thinks that for some, the revelry was nothing more than a feverish urge to allow themselves to hope. He aches. Napping in rock piles is not restful.

The heavy steel car lift is only one of the ways into the Citadel. It is the largest, and it is the most direct, but it is also currently inoperable. The lowest levels of the War Boys’ eyrie are a hundred meters above ground. Perhaps the huge counterweights for the platform could provide something for him to climb… he looks around; there are chains dangling everywhere, a web of flaking iron, and—where did they get those ladders?

There are ladders with rebar struts hanging from the lower levels. It is hard to see them from a distance. They had not been there when they’d chained him to the front of Nux’s rig.

Are they guarded? They would be pulled up if those in the Citadel keep wanted to prevent anyone from getting in. No need to guard what isn’t there. He climbs.

Time slips. Even when his ears are sharper than usual and his breathing is shallow from watchfulness, detail is washed from the world. The corridors are ghostly, as though he could walk right into the stone—but is it the stone that is immaterial, or he? She giggles as if he’d said it to her. “You’re not a ghost, yet,” she says. It is a joke.

He selects one of the motorcycles. There are guns in another room; he selects two, packs his pockets with spare shells, and adds a long knife. He does not know where his things were taken when they took his car. When Nux got his jacket, it was without the useful odds and ends he had squirreled away.

Had he ever eaten squirrels? He did not think so. They had died out before he had become truly desperate, or he had wandered into the Wasteland when he still had pride. Something like that.

He was back in the mesh of girders, motorcycle in tow. There were ramps; they had difficult turns. Furiosa was by the ladders. She was expecting him. He had not thought it improbable that she would find him, if she wanted to, injury or not. The Imperator knew what he was. His hands hurt on the handlebars. His stomach burned.

She nods to the motorcycle. “Between the two of us, we can lower that.”

He lets her deftly check the loops of doubled chain and toss the other end over an extra pulley. Lowering it is not as demanding with another to help bear the weight.

“Max,” Furiosa says as he starts climbing down. He pauses and glances up. She looks him in the eyes and it is personal. It makes him uncomfortable. He does not think he could meet the standards of personhood. “When—if you need anything—come here. Come back to Citadel.”

He cannot promise this. She does not ask him to.

Riding a motorcycle is different from driving a car. The stars here are not as beautiful as the ones over the Plains of Silence.

III.

The Wasteland welcomes him back to its barren ruin. The sun rises, tinting the brown and red with silvery gilt. It is the only time of day that the Wasteland could be considered beautiful, and even this beauty is almost more than he deserves.

After so long with _people_ around, the solitude is bliss. It is familiar here, it is safe—well, in the sense that he knows what to expect and how to deal with it. He does not have to worry about letting anyone down. There is a little regret, for that sort of a family, but he knows that it is foolish. He is not someone for whom there is a bright future—he has no place in the meticulous hard work and idealism that reforms a society. He is no longer a someone who can be safely _in_ society. It is better that he is out here.

The heat of the day soon forces him into a narrow ravine to spend the hottest hours in shelter. He is not in a car with a windshield to protect him from moisture-sucking wind or a roof to provide some modicum of respite from the blazing sun and he must be careful. He takes a minute to curse the War Boys who took and destroyed his precious car, but his tongue is already growing thickly clumsy without the imperative to speak and be comprehensible.

At least he has his jacket. That’s something.

“Max, I’m boooored,” she whines. “I don’t want to play hide and seek.”

He starts making a list of things that he can fix on the motorcycle. When the sun begins to set, he continues to head nor’ east. He does not recall having driven through the land north of here; now is as good a time as any.

IV.

He should not have gotten involved. He hardly intended to—it was, bizarrely, a complete accident that he wound up driving into the aftermath of a raid.

He had been snaking through a long, low patchwork of dirt hills and sand dunes when the curve around a large cliff shot him into view. The raiders had either been expecting reinforcements or they had not heard his motor—they shouted when he appeared and scrambled for their vehicles, away from the still forms of two men and one woman who lay sprawled across a field of metal debris. In the center of the area, the wrecked hulk of a—well, something stood sticking out of the sand.

He was caught against the cliff face. He could try shooting straight through, or arc wide over the dune and hope it did not turn into an avalanche, or turn around—no that would take too much time—he shoots for the dune and narrowly misses getting skewered by some sort of pole weapon. His momentum slows in the soft sand and he revs it as high as it goes, and _fuck_ , _shit what is that_ he is yanked right off the seat by his jacket. The pole had a hook on it, they hooked him off. Fucking _christ._ For a moment he thinks the darkness of subterranean tunnels overtakes him but his ungraceful landing jars him back to the present.

He hits the ground rolling, trying not to gasp for air when it is driven from his lungs, and scrambles to his feet just as the motorcycle whizzes past and something slams into the side of his head. He sees stars.

After that, the first thing that comes to his attention is the sensation of being dragged. Some people are arguing in a guttural language that sounds vaguely familiar. He is dropped. He feels heavy and slow.

Perhaps because this has already happened to him recently, Max takes a moment to get his bearings, muddled though they are. Neither his arms nor legs have been bound; no one is holding him. The two who are arguing are on his left. He is not lying on sand but hard-packed dirt, and his knife is still tucked into his waistband. There are two more people on the other side of him, and farther away. He cracks an eye open and the setting sun burns his eyes, but he finds what he needs; in arms’ reach is some sort of metal bar.

He scrambles up and grabs the bar, swinging it hard at the head of the closest raider. She drops, stunned, though probably not down for the count because his aim was off and he clipped her across the head. The other reaches for something, but Max is faster; his knife glances off bone and sinks deep into the raider’s chest. He spins around to face the others as he yanks it out. The other two raiders, swathed in the same layers of red and brown, are alert; one has a gun, and the other has a pair of knives. Max throws his and the gun-toting raider staggers back, blood spurting from his face—non-lethal but distracting. He charges and catches a blade across his arm before he knocks the other out of the raider’s hand, gets a good hold on him, and slams him into the ground. He scoops the knife as the raider drops it and shoves it up through the gun owner’s gut as the other aims, crazily, the shots turned into muted pops. The raider loses his hold and drops like a stone. Gun secured, Max stands—flinching, one leg hurts a _lot,_ but whatever it is, blood loss is minimal—and spots the first raider groggily trying to get up. He shoots her.

There is a high-pitched whine. Ears ringing—that was the phrase, wasn’t it? None of them are moving.

This is when he notices two women trussed and gagged on the other side of the structure in the crater than the view he got coming in.

They stare at him; they are frightened. He is reminded of Splendid and Dag and Capable and Toast and Cheedo, when he found them after the sandstorm. If these women hadn’t been so obviously incapacitated he might have attacked them, too; you could never be sure out here.

He takes a moment to listen to the Wasteland. At least, he thinks it is a moment; his heartbeat pounds in his ears. There are no motors he can hear, or voices on the wind. He aches, and sharp pains in his leg and head remind him he has more immediate things to deal with. He goes to the captives and roughly cuts the gag from one of them.

“What is this?” he asks.

The woman sucks in a breath. Her wide eyes belie her calm tone. “We were here to scavenge from the satellite. They took us by surprise.”

“Who—” he grasps for the words “—are you?”

“We’re scientists,” she says. “We want the solar panels.”

He cannot remember what solar panels are, if he ever knew what they were. He vaguely remembers that satellites are from space—Dag talked about it by the Plains of Silence. He can see that she has no weapons, concealed or otherwise—the raiders must have taken care of that. He is sawing at the ropes when she barks “look out!” and he has just enough time to throw himself to the side that the knife sinks into his shoulder instead of sliding between his ribs. It hurts. He loses his train of thought for a minute, working purely on instinct.

When things snap back into focus, the raider with the knives is sinking to the ground in front of him, eyes glassy. He is holding a gun whose metal has been painted red and the heft is light; an empty clip. His shoulder throbs and he is surprised to see the hilt of another knife sticking from his front—did he get stabbed again? It’s the same fucking shoulder, too. _Damn_ it.

He pulls it out and turns to reorient himself. He’s four meters from the women, both deathly pale and definitely scared now. His ears roar as he goes back to them and starts cutting at the ropes again, feeling mildly bemused that Murphy’s Law hadn’t struck and taken out his dominant arm.

“Get moving,” he says tersely as the first woman shakes off the ropes and grabs one of the discarded knives to cut her friend free. “Too much noise. They’ll hear.”

“Our truck is good to move,” she says, working fast. “You got anything you want to take along?”

“I’ll make it. You go,” he says, ignoring the lightheadedness of blood loss. It was worse in the two days’ span of being hooked up to Nux and then keeping Furiosa alive. He goes over to the nearest body with the intention of making an improvised bandage from that scarf when his vision swirls sickeningly and he stumbles and falls to one knee. He blinks at the ground, trying to work out when things got so bad his balance went off.

He blinks again and the women are on either side of him, coaxing him back up. “We’ve got your things,” the one says. “We’ll take you with us.”

“I’m fine,” he says, but he must not say it clearly enough because they continue to guide him to a small truck he did not recall seeing before. It’s a normal truck, with a bed meant to haul things in. In a world where every vehicle is modified to be intensely defensive or a machine of war, something—practical?—it is bizarre.

He remembers alternately being pulled and pushed into the truck bed still protesting, before someone climbs up next to him. The engine rumbles to life and the truck jerks forward. As it climbs up the slope of a dune, he catches a view of the wreckage of the satellite, surrounded by several bodies and three motorcycles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WELP... here I am. With a fic I haven't finished already hanging around. I'm sorry Hobbit nerf fans; I saw Mad Max and my heart got redirected. The past month has been tremendously difficult for me PTSD- and depression-wise, and this is my way of coping because Max is entirely too relatable.
> 
> I'm not sure when this will be finished; I have it planned out, but I needed to post something or I may have dropped it entirely.


	2. ...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Scientists?

V.

They are coming for him and he runs. He doesn’t know what they will do when they catch him but he knows it will be _bad_ and absolutely no rational part of his mind, if he has any left, can talk him out of the unremitting fear of it. Ahead of him, she stands crying on the edge of a cliff, paralyzed. He has to get to her before they do. Has to, has to—

Hands are on him, coming from everywhere. He cannot see who they belong to. They cling to him and pull him back, dragging him off his feet and away. He looks at her desperately in time to see a neat red hole appear on her temple and she stares at him as she falls, he is weighted down and held back he _can’t move_ —

Suddenly everything is more vivid. Four of them are holding him down while a fifth does something that _hurts_. He can see their faces, see them looking at him, they are all different, they are holding him down.

“Hold him,” snaps the fifth as he jerks, trying to throw one of them off. He does not want to be held, they need to get away from him right now let him go let him go get _off_ —

“It’s okay!” A woman is speaking urgently to him. She looks familiar. “It’s okay,” she says, “you’re all right, we’re _helping_ you—”

He does not know who she is and then his arm is free. Immediately he swings at the person holding his other arm and falters halfway through as fire rips through his shoulder. His arm is dragged back down.

Voices are echoing over each other. The stars are clearing from his vision just as someone holds a sort of mask over his nose and mouth. He thrashes some more before everything disappears and he is left floating in freezing blackness, unable move or do much of anything except panic as the voices continue to crash over him.

VI.

He does not know how long it is before the darkness fades, but it is long enough that he can barely remember what he was doing in it in the first place. He is so tired. Light seeps in to replace the dark, and then he is looking at gray.

He blinks. He can feel the breath coming in through his throat and his chest expand with the pleasant stretch of getting up and walking after having been sitting for a long time. There is a sound—it is very familiar, but he can’t place it—sort of a soft scrape and crackle. Paper, he thinks distantly, but cannot remember what that is at present or how it would apply to the specific sound.

He blinks again. The gray is not uniform. It curves some distance over him. There is light coming from his left and shadows on his right. There is a gentle weight over his hips and legs that does not keep him from moving, though his right leg throbs warningly when he shifts it. Cloth drags over his toes; he is not wearing his boots.

Try though he might, he could not rouse himself to alarm. Lethargy hung over him and made him sluggish and slow. He tries sitting up and hisses when he puts too much weight on his left shoulder. He levers himself up slowly on his right arm, the muscles in his belly aching sharply from overuse. The movement makes him dizzy.

He is in an unfamiliar room. It is underground—it is too cool to be close to or on the surface. There are no windows. The light comes from a light bulb mounted in a little lantern, set on a table.

He stares at it. He hasn’t seen light bulbs outside of those used in cars, headlights and taillights, in—in—he can’t remember, honestly. Not since he entered the Wasteland.

There is a soft exclamation and a snap of movement that has him startling around. A woman is sitting at the table, looking at him. She is holding a book. The sound that was familiar was the sound of a page being turned. She is also familiar, but he can’t place her.

“Hey, there,” she says gently, setting the book on the table. “How are you feeling?”

He feels like he is in a dream, except it has been a long, long time since he has faced anything but nightmares in his sleep. It contributes to the feeling of unreality.

“Where‘m I?” he says. It comes out hoarse and raw, small around the tightness in his throat.

“You’re in Avalon,” she replies, still soothing. “It’s an old research facility, from before the Oil Wars.”

That… makes even less sense. Research—science? Scientists. People who mix chemicals and wear white coats and glasses. He guesses that is how they have light bulbs. “How’d—” he needs to think. “I come—”

“Myra and I brought you back,” she says. “You killed the raiders and got us free at the satellite.”

He remembers that. He was stabbed, which explains why his shoulder hurts like fuck. He looks at it; it’s been wrapped in clean-looking cloth bandages. He isn’t wearing a shirt.

“Where’re my clothes?” he demands abruptly, upon realizing he is also not wearing anything approximating trousers. His skin crawls, but he stuffs down the urge to pull the blanket up to his chin because then it would be much harder to move if he needed to fight his way out.

She points to another chair pulled up to the table. On the seat is a stack of neatly-folded things, topped with his jacket. “We cleaned them as best we could,” she said. “I can help you put them on.”

“I can,” he says tersely, tension thrumming as best it can under his fatigue.

She gives way easily. “May I bring them to you?” She must get the idea that that is almost as bad as offering to help him put them on and hurriedly adds “it’s just that you really shouldn’t be walking with your leg shot up—the bullet cracked the bone and it was a messy extraction.”

“It’s fine,” he says flatly. She hesitates, but doesn’t object.

“I’ll leave you to put them on,” she says, and telegraphs her movements as she gets up slowly. “I’m Jen—I’ll wait outside the door, so call me if you need anything.”

He waits as she leaves and closes the door behind her. There is no clunk of a lock. Some of the tension leaves his shoulders. After another minute of no one returning, he tries getting up.

His lower leg, when he swings it out from under the blanket, is similarly wrapped as his shoulder. It twinges when he sets his bare feet flat on the floor, which is rough and cool. There is a small—rug—of coiled braided cloth that is also on the floor. The table and chairs are a few meters away from the bed.

It’s hard to get standing. He can’t push himself up with his left arm, and putting weight on his right leg makes the room spin. Eventually he makes it upright, and limps over to the chair, shoulder protesting every lopsided stride that favors his leg. When he gets to the table he is breathing hard and he has to lean most of his weight against it.

He takes a long time putting on the clothes. Everything must be done with one hand and that complicates things. He struggles with his trousers and winds up sitting in the woman’s chair so that he doesn’t topple over as he carefully eases them over his injured leg. After that exhausting experience, he looks at his shirt and jacket and decides to forgo the former and carefully pulls on his coat. He leaves it open. He can pull up the pant leg easily if they need to do something with his bandages, but he would have to pull off the shirt entirely where he can keep the jacket partly on.

Most of the dirt, pleasantly enough, has been beaten out of them. They smell a little sharp; the scent brings up dim thoughts of cleaner and shiny just-mopped linoleum floors. The cloth is flexible and is not stiff with weeks of sweat and blood and grime all worked into a sort of crusted roughness.

He is also clean. This is surprising. The grime has been washed from his skin, though there are traces of more recent salt and blood. He pushes contemplation of this state out of his mind as he begins to feel uncomfortable at the thought of it.

There is not a lot in the room. The bed he was in has a tangled blanket over a thin pallet, which is headed by a flat pillow. The frame is an old, sterile, ugly metal frame with a weave of some sort of cord to hold the pallet. The light bulb glows steadily. The table looks like it was made from old crates. Neither chair appears to have anything useful to pull out, until he realizes that his knife is in his jacket pocket, along with the coil of twine and the pair of mismatched nuts he had been toying with of late. He immediately feels more at ease knowing that he has a weapon.

He spots the book she left behind on the table next to the light bulb lamp. It is old and worn, unsurprisingly. _The Odyssey_ he reads, in plain font on the cover. _Homer_ follows underneath. The paper cover has a faded illustration of a stylized man wearing armor and holding a spear. He remembers hearing about this story.

He flinches at the quiet knock on the door and he drops the book back on the table. “May I come in?” Jen calls from outside. “I have some food for you.”

He makes himself take a deep breath. She has not come in. She is waiting for permission. That is polite. When a minute goes by without any response, she knocks again and says “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” he says gruffly, and realizes she probably can’t hear it. “Come in,” he says, louder.

She brings him soup. It is thin but tastes good and comes with—incredibly—bread. He has not eaten bread in years. He eats half of it and stops, lacking appetite to finish. Jen does not comment on it, but he sees her evaluating him.

Instead, she talks about this place. A research facility designed for up to fifty people in the old days, set underground because the climate back then had also been hot. It was made to be self-sufficient. He is not sure what that means, but she talks about a recycling water system and snippets of memories come to mind, like _recycle: good for the bottle, good for the can_ and a memory of a show on rainforests. It is incredibly jarring, this forced recall of something other than the Wasteland.

Maybe she sees him getting antsy or maybe she thinks he’s tired, but she does not leave him with the half-finished meal for too long.

“I’ll take these things to the kitchens and let you rest,” she says, tactfully not offering assistance to the bed. “There will be someone sitting in the corridor outside. You had a concussion, and now that your other injuries have been tended to, they’ll wake you up every few hours to make sure you’re all right. You can ask them for me if you need anything. They won’t stop you from leaving,” she adds, watching him shift uneasily at the thought of guards outside the room. “But I doubt you can get very far as you are now, and you are welcome to stay.”

It’s not totally reassuring, but she is gathering things up to go. “I’ll come back with breakfast in the morning,” she says. “It’s a little after midnight now, and you’re still recovering, but if you have trouble going to sleep I can bring you something… no? All right.”

She leaves with a cheerful “Goodnight!” and he stares after her for a moment, absolutely at a loss.

He looks over at the bed, and thinks about testing her claim that no one would stop him if he left. He has no frame of reference for this situation. Everything is alien to him, even having known what the world was like before the Wasteland came to be. It puts him on edge.

He tries standing again and knows immediately that he will not be able to test the guards’ tolerance. If he was just dealing with the pain, he might be able to get out, but fatigue weighs him down and fast movement makes the world tilt. The food may feel like iron in his stomach, but his brain still registers it as food and clamors for him to pay attention to his need for sleep.

He leaves the light on and crosses painfully back to the bed. He moves the pillow to the other end of the bed and eases himself under the blanket, able to curl on his side with his back to the wall and keep his eyes on the door.

VII.

At some point, he dozes off. He wakes once from another nightmare to hear someone knocking on the door and asking if he was all right, and only just remembers that the woman had told him they would do that and that it was not an attack. The second time he is not sure how long he sleeps because he does not recall having any nightmares before the argument outside the door wakes him again. The longer he sleeps, the more likely he is to wake up gasping and swinging at ghosts; but he feels more clear-headed than he did before he slept, so he supposes he got a few hours in.

Either way, it is the raised voices which wake him up, not dreams. They are accompanied by footsteps and become more audible; the arguers are coming down the hall.

“…stupid. The Dusters know something went down. If you’d at least left him for them to find—”

“Don’t even think about it. We covered our tracks. They’ll not find us here.” This was the woman, Jen. She sounded irritated.

“We’re not that far from the wreckage. What if they come looking—”

“Then they’ll come,” Jen says crisply. “It’s not like we can toss him back out there _now_. Now shut up and do your job.”

He has his knife out and scrambles to get his feet under him. His leg flares with pain, bright and hot, and his shoulder drags, but it is better to face your enemies standing—

Someone knocks on the door. He freezes.

“Hello?” Jen calls from outside. “We wanted to come check your bandages. Are you awake? May we come in?”

This is entirely unexpected. He grips the knife tighter and ignores the persistent fire of his injuries.

“We?” he asks, unsure of what is going on.

“It’s me, Jen,” Jen says, and still does not come in. “I brought our doctor, Geoff. He’s the one who stitched you up.”

There is a long, painful moment of silence. This is not the behavior of people who are going to kill him—or at least, not kill him right now. His breath comes sharper. He wobbles.

“Yeah,” he says, not quite lowering the knife. He realizes he said it too quietly for them to hear. He licks his lips and tries again. “Yeah… yes.”

The door opens slowly, and Jen looks at him as though for permission again over a tray that has a plate, food, and a cup on it. The man behind her looks unhappy, and then blanches. He lowers the knife and nods shallowly to Jen, but keeps his eyes on the man who had argued he be left in the Wasteland. It was a practical idea to have left him behind, but he found that he did not care for being used as bait.

Jen made a noise of disapproval as she came in. “Please sit back down,” she said anxiously. “You really shouldn’t strain your leg.”

He hesitated, but the other man kept away and she made no move to force him down. He sat down slowly and wound up landing rather heavily as his leg decided to give out under him.

Jen smiled and set the tray on the table. “I brought breakfast as well,” she says, “just in case you were awake and hungry. But it’ll take Geoff only a moment to sort you out, do you mind waiting until he’s finished?”

He did not like the idea of anyone touching him at all. In the Wasteland, being touched meant feeling pain, and he did not doubt that prodding or pulling at bandages would not be an exception to that rule. But it was bandages, which meant it was ostensibly for healing, which meant that the pain would not necessarily be indicative of someone trying to kill him.

He tipped his head slightly in acquiescence. The doctor was afraid of him, and he had no qualms about keeping the knife out and in plain view as the other man moved in gingerly and looked at his leg.

“So where did you come from?” Jen asked him as the bandages were unwound. She pulled one of the chairs between the bed and the table and sat in it.

“Nowhere,” he replies, which is the truth. From nowhere, going nowhere.

“Are you just a wanderer then?” she continues pleasantly, as though most of the Wasteland inhabitants were foolish enough to wander indiscriminately through others’ territories.

He nods, eyes on the doctor as he examines the neat line of stitches a few inches south of his knee. They are red and puffy, but the doctor does not seem alarmed.

“What direction were you coming in from?” Jen asks next.

Does it matter? “South,” he says. “Why?”

“Straight south?” the doctor says, pausing as he rewraps the bandage. He sounds like he doesn’t believe him. “Through the Reavers’ territory?”

He looks at the doctor, who is staring accusingly at Jen. Since the doctor has stalled, he tugs the bandages out of the doctor’s hands and finishes wrapping his leg himself. The doctor makes a spluttery noise, but stops when Jen kicks him sharply in the foot.

“Who’re they?” he asks Jen, ignoring the doctor.

“The area south of here is more or less run by the Reavers,” she answers apologetically as the doctor motions him to take off his jacket so he can look at his shoulder. He tugs the one arm off reluctantly. “They’re rather brutal; they don’t leave anyone alive. You found us on their borders. The ones you saved us from, the Dusters, they’re west of here. It’s actually surprising that they sent a party out so far from their territory.”

The doctor clucks under his breath. “You’ve ripped two stitches,” he tells him brusquely. “We’re going to have to redo them.”

He looks at where the doctor is pointing. There is a little blood and the line of stitches has come partly undone.

The doctor is fiddling with things from a small bag—a needle, some sort of odd-looking thread. Briskly, he turns back and reaches for his shoulder, but at the sudden movement he is scrambling away to get his back to the wall before he registers that this is also not an attack.

The doctor looks ill. He sweats. “I need to put the stitches back in or your shoulder won’t heal,” he says.

“No,” he says. He transfers the knife to his left hand and holds out his other, motioning for the doctor to hand him the needle.

The doctor looks angry. “Will you just let me—”

“Give it to him,” Jen interrupts. She is relaxed where she sits. The man snaps his mouth shut and glowers, but he holds out the needle.

The thread feels like some sort of treated animal gut. The needle is curved and sharp, without any rust. He sets his jaw and gets to work, quickly and neatly replacing the two torn stitches even with one hand.

The doctor woodenly accepts the needle when he’s finished. Max trims the excess gut with his knife and also hands that over. “No,” he says sharply when the doctor makes as though he will rewrap his shoulder. “Her.”

“Go ahead and get back to your duties,” Jen tells the glowering doctor. “I can handle the rest from here.”

Jen smiles at him after the doctor gets his things together and walks out, closing the door behind him with excessive force. “Don’t mind Geoff,” she tells him. “You almost gave him a black eye while he was pulling the bullet out of your leg. He’s not particularly brave, that one.”

She helps him wrap up his shoulder. He is able to disguise his tension better knowing that she would be easier to overpower alone than having to deal with two people together in the state he’s in.

“Why me?” he asks roughly when the last end has been wound and tacked in. She offers him an arm; he grasps it lightly but does not actually draw on her to support himself as he moves to sit at the table. He settles heavily in the chair she did not move, the one with its back to the wall, feeling sweat break out, and works hard not to show how much the few steps hurt.

“You saved us,” she says easily, pushing the tray towards him. It is not quite soup, but stew; though the contents appear to be mostly vegetable. Vegetable, as in things recognizable from foods he and his wife used to prepare—slices of squash, chopped celery and carrots. The broth is bland, but that appears to be a lack of salt more than a lack of flavoring. “Me and Myra. You didn’t even hesitate when you noticed us.”

He supposes that would be odd in a Wasteland full of dog-eat-dog societies. He knows that before, it would not be strange, and that that in itself is a strange reminder. (In this moment, he almost hates her for bringing him here—this place where the Wasteland is the aberration, not the rule.)

“Shhhh, Max,” she coos, standing next to Jen as Jen pulls the chair up to the table and seats herself opposite him. Maggie grins, all sunshine and delight.

“I know the world is fucked,” Jen is saying wryly, and it brings him back to her, “but it didn’t look like you were from anywhere around us—” She waves a hand in a vague circle. “None of them would have a lone rider out like you were.”

“Mmm,” he replies around a mouth full of stringy root when the silence grows too long.

“It was the least we could do,” she says, looking down at her clasped hands—white-knuckled, despite her care—before smiling. He sets down the carved spoon.

“Thank you,” he says, and his voice is ten ways fucked and nowhere near human, but she relaxes at it anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't think anyone except the person coming out with the comics knows what the girl's name is, but she looked like a Maggie to me.


	3. ?...

VIII.

It is a week before he can walk around the small room without needing to sleep immediately afterwards. To say it is frustrating is an understatement; by the third day, he is pacing the room—badly, and usually he winds up having to sit on the floor in random spots as he exhausts himself. On the fourth day, Jen jokes about tying him down to keep him from hurting himself, but he can see she also means it. He restricts himself to two laps around the room a day.

At her suggestion, he tries reading the book she left behind to fill the time. The language is horrifically archaic, but he finds he can understand it for the most part. Maybe he read it a long time ago. He struggles through the first few chapters and discovers (or recalls) that the story is not tremendously exciting. It is better than nothing, though, and Maggie is quiet if he reads it aloud to her, no matter how haltingly. It is enough interaction to placate her for a while afterwards.

Jen brings every meal and keeps him company as he eats. She is the one who changes his bandages now; the doctor is regretfully always busy with other work. He only comes by once, when Jen is worried he has gotten some sort of infection, and even then he examines things from several feet away before pronouncing that he needs to stop walking around the room so much. Jen also helps him to a closet, a—a toilet, a water closet—once, sometimes twice a day. It is embarrassing, but it is better than having the guard of the day help out—having someone unknown supporting him on the way to the dunny is much, much worse.

She tells him all about this place—the research center, Avalon. He has little to say, and what she says is interesting enough, so it works. He learns that it was situated inside a tabled plateau—a sort of hill whose sides are cliffs, and which is flattened at the top—because it meant that the solar panels would never be in the shade. The solar panels are how they have electricity for light bulbs. The original inhabitants were a team of researchers, their assistants, and some of their families. When the funding—the money to spend on research—ended with the fall of a centralized authority, some of the inhabitants left, but most stayed. Now it is a small, hidden village in the Wasteland.

Sometimes she brings Myra with her, the other woman at the ruins of the satellite. She smiles at him when he first sees her and thanks him for saving them. That he has no idea how to respond to that fazes her a little, but she comes back two days later and sits with him and Jen all through dinner.

On the day that he could walk around his room without having to sleep afterwards, Jen took him out. They made it to the end of the corridor where the guard was stationed before they had to turn back. The next day, they get a little further, and the day after that he finds out that the right-hand corridor leads to an infirmary after the intersection. Then they explore the series of storerooms at the end of the shorter left-hand corridor, and at the end of the second week he makes it to the kitchens.   

His first impression of the kitchens is _heat_ , almost as hot as the surface. His second impression is that they are filled with people. The light inside is orange—here, electric light is hardly used when fire burns in multiple areas to cast its own light. It turns the reddish-gray walls into a flickering, shifting landscape that is almost as disorienting as suddenly being _held down, hard high buzzing, pain in a delicate line following the curve of letters in his back_  he cannot breathe, the grinning skulls of WarBoys turning to watch him—

He jerks free and runs right into Jen. _What is she_ … she was never at the Citadel—

“Hey,” she’s saying urgently. “Hey, come back. Come this way, come on.” He follows, just confused enough that being presented with the cool darkness of the storeroom they’d come through is enough to jar him back out of it.

He is breathing hard. Jen talks to him calmly. He grinds his hand into his eyes and tries to force those particular memories away from the present.

“Come on,” Jen repeats soothingly, and leads him further into the storerooms and away from the kitchens.

It is difficult to focus on other things, but. “You’re very good at being calm,” he says haltingly, willing his throat to open. He forces himself to move to this topic, away from himself. In the two weeks he has been there, she has never blinked, not once, at his behavior. Others have. The last person he can remember like this is Furiosa, and he knows that she had first-hand experience with the aftereffects of battling for survival—here in Avalon, whose defense was secrecy and camouflage as opposed to direct confrontation, he doubts Jen learned from that.

Jen smiles at him. “Thank you,” she says. “I’m a scientist of a sort, like everyone else here. My area of expertise is psychology, or studying how our—human—minds work. Things like dealing with grief, or loss, or being in dangerous situations.”

He doesn’t say anything to that. It’s not an answer he imagined. She nods anyway, understanding. “It’s not how to grow things, or how to tend to animals,” she says as the leave the storerooms and walk the familiar corridor, “but especially—here, it is also important.”

“Not wounds,” he comments.

“Not outwardly,” Jen says slowly. “But they are still there.”

That night, his sleep is filled with nightmares.

The next day, Jen persuades him to go back—not into the kitchens directly, but to stay in the entrance and observe. He walks through the corridors with her, reminding himself to be ready for it, ready for that feeling, and he watches the approaching flicker of firelight and times his breaths, and—they halt some distance from the entrance. It is like looking through a window.

He spends the time counting six adults older than fifty and eight children between the ages of four and sixteen, noting the positions of the four large ovens interspersed along the right-hand wall, examining the heavy trestle-type tables where ingredients are prepared close to the entrance, and seeing the huge pots on the open hearth situated along the left-hand wall. The chimneys lead up and into the ceiling, which is higher than everywhere else he has been to in Avalon—it is six, maybe seven meters above the floor. He wonders how they were able to create a room this large. She follows them back to the little room, humming some tune in the silence.

On the third day, he enters cautiously. He is flanked by Jen and Myra. He does not have high hopes for the encounter. He is, therefore, pleasantly surprised to find that most of the people working are too busy to bother spending time seeing who the newcomer is.

Jen steers them to a frazzled-looking man with flyaway hair tied back with a bandanna. “Got food for us, Jim?” she asks.

He blinks at them comically. “I have lots of food,” he says, confused. “Did you want anything particularly?”

“Just something easy to carry,” Myra tells him. Jim nods distractedly, leaves them to yell at a trio of ten-year-olds who’ve set some bread on fire, and comes back with a small loaf, some fruit, and some sort of—spread? Dip? He doesn’t remember what it is called. They take it with thanks and go back to the storerooms, where Myra lays it out on a small cloth in a corner. He sits with his back against the wall and a good view of both entrances.

“This place is big,” he says at one point to Jen around a mouthful of bread, watching the activity in the kitchens. It is; she has told him that there are something like two hundred people living in Avalon, and none of the areas they have been through so far have housed any of them.

“It’s been enlarged a little,” she says thoughtfully, tearing pieces from the small loaf for herself and Myra. “We had to take out a lot of the original appliances and refit things for a lower-powered system than it was installed for.”

“We’ve also added the greenhouses,” Myra adds, sounding proud. He recalls that she is something called a botanist; her job is to grow things. He has a feeling greenhouses have something to do with growing things, so it makes sense. “We were able to make a ton of mirrors pretty easily; we can reflect the sunlight down into some of the older labs. We carted soil down and found a workable system for irrigation.”

“Plants? You have green things?”

“We have green things aplenty,” Myra tells him, sitting up straighter. “Would you like to see? Jen, can we take him…?”

Jen looks thoughtful. “Let me figure out the best way to go,” she tells Myra, and, turning to him, adds “If you hadn’t guessed, Avalon is a real warren; there are so many routes we could take, I can certainly find one for us.”

At the beginning of the third week, he is halfway through _The Odyssey_ and his restlessness is no longer curbed by pain (at least, not as badly as when he arrived). The book is a little more interesting, but not interesting enough to stay.

He has seen the greenhouses, which he found interesting if only because he had not seen that many living things all in one place before. She had left him alone for a whole day to explore. He learns about things like manual pollination and drip irrigation and he remembers mostly none of it, but he has not had much experience gardening before and it does not bother him.

Jen’s company grates on him, recently. He is restless in a way that walking in cool corridors does not satisfy.

“Did you get my motorcycle?” he asks her abruptly near the end of lunch one day.

She looks surprised. “You mean from the satellite?”

“Yes,” he says.

She purses her lips and her gaze turns distant. “I believe some of our recovery team went out and brought back what they could,” she says, “but I don’t know for certain if your motorcycle was part of it. I can ask, if you like.”

“Yes,” he repeats.

She looks like she wants to ask him something, but she changes her mind partway through and asks something else. “How is your shoulder feeling?”

It’s stiff. It’s spent most of the past few weeks in a sling, which she brought for him on the third day. Still, there is no infection, and his stitches were to be removed within a few days.

“Fine,” he says. She suspects what he wants to do, he can see, but she does not press him about it. At dinner she tells him that they had not retrieved his motorcycle, but they had two of the Dusters’ bikes in working condition.

IX.

The day they remove the stitches in his shoulder, he tells Jen he is going to leave.

She is quiet for a long time. “You can stay,” she says eventually, with a peculiar expression. “You don’t have to leave here if you don’t want to.”

“No.” He tips his head in a lopsided nod, avoiding her eyes. “I am going anyway.”

“Wait until the morning,” she bargains. “No, not because I think I can persuade you—” she adds hurriedly at his expression, “just, let me get some things together for you, is all.”

He hesitates, but it seems genuine. “Tomorrow,” he says, reluctantly. And when he wakes early the next morning, she has breakfast and a small satchel with her. She and Myra see him off in the early dawn, pulling aside the camouflage curtains that hid the ground entrance to Avalon when a sentry reports that no one is nearby.  

“Listen,” Jen says to him as he wheels the motorcycle clear of the cliff face. “I put a radio in your bag. Its battery charges solar—just keep it out in the sun to charge it. If you ever come back this way, you can use it to find us.”

“Be careful around satellites,” he tells her, starts the bike, and heads just shy of true east so that the sun is not directly in his eyes.

X.

The Wasteland is the Wasteland. It is freedom, an escape (an escape you cannot escape). It is home.

There is dirt. There are plants (usually dead, or dying). There are lizards. Sometimes they even have one head.

There are endless marauders; some he outruns, some he outwits. He tricks one particularly enthusiastic tail into driving off a cliff, and curses being unable to scavenge the wreck.

Around the time his leg no longer aches to stand on it, he acquires a car and all that is within it—some weapons, some ammunition, a nice collection of tools. A small quantity of some sort of dried food. It is a variant of a scouting or patrol vehicle, and is moderately armored. The bodies he strips and dumps, feeling curiously elated with his performance.

But that is the only rare good day (if one can have good days in the Wasteland). Maggie does not like the Wasteland. Without—she is bored, now that it is just him, and now that he has stopped reading the book to her. Sometimes she plays hide-and-seek to see if she can scare him. Sometimes she sings songs. Most often, she stares. He hates it when she stares. It is his fault that she stares, shadowed empty sockets in a skeletal face. She looks at him and looks at him until he has to look at her, but she disappears before he ever meets her gaze.

There are long periods of time where she disappears entirely. Those are the days when everything is slow and grey and he is weighed down by exhaustion and the urge to _sleep, just a nap, just close your eyes_. The sleep is rarely restful and often host to worse nightmares than ghosts. These days are dangerous unless he has found a good place to hide; otherwise he drives slowly and does his best not to doze behind the wheel.

The days are hot and merciless. It is the Wasteland; time does not matter here. He does not have to think about survival the way he had to think about protecting. This is what he tells himself. He marks his map and keeps moving.


	4. <cold>

XI.

He is awakened by the scent of blood.

He was napping in his car. The seat springs dig uncomfortably into his thighs as he sits upright quickly. He leaves the windows open at night (if only just a crack) to ensure fresh air in the cabin of the car—nothing is worse than stale air. It feels like he is trapped within the earth. It was dusk when he dozed off; it is late, now, possibly around two or three hours before dawn.

The mirrors show nothing behind him and nothing on either side. The moon is a sickly half-full, light dim and useful when tracking things that move, but terrible for detail. Right now, he needs detail. It did not smell like blood when he parked the vehicle tucked into the outcropping of granite. Something has moved into this depression with him, something that smells of death and despair.

But nothing moves. Was the rise in front of him higher than at sunset? Sand hisses and shufts with the wind. He is afraid to open the door. Are the shadows real or imagined? Are there monsters making the hissing, or is it truly the wind? So many things have happened—there has been so much since—he honestly cannot tell what is real in this light, in this setting. Blood is too familiar a companion for him to do anything more than note that he has not caused it, and so it should not be there. Except he has caused so much of it that sometimes it follows him, and she follows him, and it mingles with horror and fear and rotting things and noises and—

There is no noise. There is nothing he would not expect. That is worse.

Silently, he reaches for the switches that connect to the ignition. Three. One. Two. Red (that is black). The engine roars (there is little to hide it) and the headlights flare and _they are everywhere,_ how are they everywhere???

He slams the car into gear with his foot pressed to the floor. The tires scream. If he aims a touch to the left he should clear the overhang easily—

Thumps, screams. The silhouettes before him shudder and fall. He isn’t moving fast enough to send them flying. Why are the ghosts after him? It’s not worth thinking about. Maggie isn’t there; she isn’t a victim, and he can live with that.

Other lights flare into his eyes. He squints to compensate, but it’s not enough. There is a moment of weightlessness that comes with car crashes, a moment where he waits for his neck to snap in some direction painfully and his whole body tenses, but he’s ready. He keeps his foot on the gas. It ends, and the tires try hard, but it’s a stalemate and his forehead collides with the steering wheel painfully.

He jams the wheel in one direction and keeps the pedal to the floor. He can’t tell if there’s yelling or if it’s metal protesting at abuse, but it’s not going anywhere. The door to the driver’s side wrenches open with a shriek and he turns to face it, fist slow but sure. He clips something. It catches his left hand and yanks weakly, but that’s all it needs; something grabs him as he’s hauled off-center and drags him farther. His legs are tangled between pedals and his own kicks and he lands in sand, spitting dirt.

He’s pulled clear viciously. He kicks and hits something, knocking it to the ground with a yelp. He gets his feet planted against the ground for leverage and wrenches hard enough for whatever’s dragging him to lose their grip and rolls to the side. Scrambling up, he cracks his head against someone’s chin and staggers. He punches blindly at the dark shape he’d seen before stars burst in his vision and he feels the solid shock of fist meeting a body.

He gets his vision slowly and dives just in time to avoid a lunge. He pulls the knife out fluidly and slashes at the nearest dark shape, which lets out a choked gurgle before falling. The pistol he scavenged two days ago is jammed into another before he pulls the trigger and the shot cracks out, breaking the silence of the fight. A third he whips with the butt of the pistol in a savage backhand that knocks small things—probably teeth—loose with a spray of something warm.

Something tight and cutting wraps around his throat and pulls. He aims in the direction of the pulling with both knife and gun, but someone catches the hand with the gun and drags it away. The knife strikes with a glancing blow before a terrible hit knocks it out of his grasp and that arm, too, is secured.

The barrel of a gun touches the underside of his chin. It is much colder than it has the right to be and sears his skin like ice.

“Very good,” the person holding the garrote says approvingly, tightening the wire for a painful moment before slacking off. “Very, very good. I’m impressed.”

He deliberately relaxes his stance for a moment, keeping his spine straight and tense. The choking wire loosens a fraction, and he slams his head back into the speaker’s nose with an awful crunch.

This time, they don’t bother securing him before they take him down.

XII.

He would have expected being killed in retaliation for the broken nose. Actually, he’d have preferred being killed to suddenly being elevated to… whatever he was now.

Waking was a nightmare. They’d restrained him—they’d literally tied him spread-eagled to a bed. He’d woken to cold and the feel of someone combing through his hair, which had been shortened considerably in the first haircut he’d had since Citadel. It was about that length again, and it was disconcerting not to feel it feathering around his ears when he whipped his head away from the hand.

The woman and the man who’d been in the act of neatening his appearance were remarkably clean and just as ridiculously dressed as Furiosa’s girls had been. They flinched from his sudden violence and avoided looking him in the eye as they stammered some sort of welcome and a bullshit message about being an honored guest.

The fact that they were obviously afraid of him, even bound as he was, was the only reason he made an effort not to react like an animal when they recited the litany of events concerning him since his arrival. He could not tell if this place—it looked underground, again—was the reason he shivered from cold, or the recounting of being washed and dried by attendant slaves, being groomed by said slaves, being carried into that particular room by other slaves, and being made presentable by the ‘companions’—the two presently speaking to him—was what chilled him.

Someone who had that amount of slaves was someone terrifying, he knew. Most rulers in the Wasteland went for a feudal state or godhood; a place where people were flat-out enslaved was something else again. These, he thought as they avoided his gaze and kept mumbling, were people who had been so thoroughly broken that they obeyed and trembled.

Under the watchful hold of two brutish guards, the man and the woman dressed him in some sort of tunic and trousers. They exchanged the rough rope bonds restraining him for glittering chains that hung from a sharp, cold collar around his throat down to his wrists and ankles. He had no problem fighting the guards, so by the time he was finally deemed presentable he was half dragged into the Hall while he wheezed for breath around a bruised belly.

The Hall was not what its name suggested. Though the ceilings were high, the room was narrow and awkwardly shaped to match the winding curve of the original cave. He could see the rough hatching of stonework in between intricately carved beams that acted as shoring, widening the fissure that water had carved thousands of years ago. The light here came from flickering lamps that threw off far more light than he expected, and the people murmuring against the walls were softened by it—their features characterized by shadows, the golden glow lent them a quality of tamed mystery.

At the far end was a crude dais upon which sat a pair of actual, real armchairs. He could not tell what their original colors had been, for they had been draped with lengths of bright cloth and furs. Furs? There hadn’t been many animals with fur that lasted long after the earth soured.

The smaller chair lacked an occupant. In the larger reclined the man whose nose he had broken in the Wasteland.

He was deceptively mild-looking, this man. He lacked the bulk for intimidation and wore clothing that had no purpose aside from being comfortable. Perhaps in his early thirties, he looked just like the sort of ridiculous lair one might expect in trendy, upscale bars in the Old World. Though he was lean, it seemed natural and not due to the dangerous occupation of survival. He was clean-shaven and not obviously dirty. Despite the crooked and swollen nose, his face expressed nothing more than disarming curiosity as he watched their progress halt at the foot of the dais.

The furs, on closer viewing, had markings and colors common in dogs and housecats. He locked his muscles so as not to shiver again.

He felt the weight of the man’s regard ease and flicked his eyes back up. The man lifted a glass— _glass_ —snifter and sipped. He sighed with distaste for whatever was in the glass and swallowed as though it pained him. (If the man was longing for better, he might sympathize; except he hadn’t really had a drink in years and sincerely doubted that this young man had, either, if ever.)

“You clean up nicely,” the man said, and handed the glass off to a silent, collared ghost. His voice recalled adrenaline-fueled panic, and his breath became short. He stood as the susurrus of attending people dropped into complete silence and came down slowly from the height of the dais. He followed the man’s movements, hyperaware of his gaze even as the guards jerked him to face forwards while the man prowled behind him

“Yes,” said the man, from behind him and to his right. It was a musing thought, not intended for anyone but the speaker. “Yes, I think you’ll do nicely.”

He moved back into view and paused, grand, in front of his throne. He met his gaze, and barely hid his flinch from the unmoving serpentine amusement of it. His heart labored; his thoughts scattered.

“I am Asa,” the man drawled. Cruelty and madness coloring his enunciation as he added, with a sharp smile, “and welcome to my kingdom: Aiaia.”

The cold was in his bones. He lunged for that smile, straining even as the guards checked his rush and choked him to the floor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry if the pronouns are confusing at the end-- they confuse me too, at this point. I'm doing my best to demarcate who is thinking/speaking/doing what, but my Max is not in a state where he considers himself as an entity with a personhood that demands a name as such; it's very much a '[general feeling of self] vs. everything' mentality, if that makes any sense.
> 
> Also, please excuse me for the lapse in updates; my fiance flew into the country back in June and I chose to spend the six weeks with him! He flew out today :( With luck, we will be able to spend time together over Christmas.


	5. freeze

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I couldn't quite find the right tags-- implied torture and torture were the best, really... Basically, there will be trauma that is deliberately inflicted.

XIII.

Asa took great pleasure in ensuring his possessions were just as civilized as he. He had no explanation for why the man was so insistent on living within the trappings of an extinct society; he barely allowed himself to remember such things. But so Asa was, and so he was put under great training.

He was taken back to the room he had woken in, stripped, and tied down to the bed. He broke three of one guard’s fingers and tore a mouthful of flesh from another’s exposed wrist, and so he was beaten into unconsciousness in the process only to wake hours later, in the dark, so cold and so stiff that he could only lie in mute agony until the harem people were marched back in to clean him up under heavy guard.

Still reluctant to lash out at them, he did not fight them. Instead, he looked for an opportunity to attack the guards. Once he was permitted to piss—with four guards watching as the two harem people timidly made a pretense of holding him in place—he jerked out of the harem peoples’ grip and was promptly clubbed to the floor from behind. They tied him back to the bed, still nude, and left him alone for another eight hours before the process was repeated.

The night was no less cold than it was during the day, but it felt worse. Stuck in one position, he endured it in brief snatches of restless sleep as his arms and legs took turns going numb.

In the morning, the harem people came again. He knew now that someone had noted his treatment of them and used them to force him into things he would otherwise fight, but he could not—would not deliberately hurt them, not after Citadel had awoken some long-forgotten sense of morality, and it was so, so stupid to have ethics in the Wasteland, but there he was.

Today, though, they brought him clothes.

“The master says,” the woman began nervously as he snatched them up and scrambled into them as fast as he could. She wet her lips before continuing. “You may wear clothing as—as a civilized man ought to, s-so long as you behave like a civilized man.”

The clothes brought the illusion of warmth, but he still shivered from the chill that seemed to have set in his bones.

“Food?” he rasped. He hadn’t eaten in two days. The shaking was probably just as much a result from that as the cave’s temperature.

“If you are well-mannered, you may eat,” the man said dully, addressing the floor.

He made a rough sound in his frustration. “When?”

“Today,” the woman whispered, and that was the end of the conversation.

This time, he was taken to a room nearby and tied upright in a chair at a table. A guard stayed in the entryway to watch him.

XIV.

Asa came, carrying a covered plate of something, followed by two people with slave collars. The sight of them made the skin of his neck prickle under the metal band around his throat.

One slave carried a small folding table behind him and began to arrange things on it. The other slave carefully laid a small rectangle of fabric on the table in front of him, and then placed a cloth napkin and a battered fork and knife upon it in a precise table setting. She then put a cup above it, and poured water from a clay pitcher. His focus immediately fixed on the sound of the water filling the cup. The dryness of his mouth became unbearable.

Asa put the platter in front of him and revealed the contents with a flourish as he removed the handle. The food was unrecognizable in how it was prepared, but the scent of roast meat and vegetable were easy enough to identify.

He wanted it. He was starving. His belly ached sharply in its emptiness. The food and its smells were suddenly the center of the world and they were all he could think about, even through the sound of Asa talking and the slaves quietly moving to stand by the wall.

The snick of a knife attracted his attention briefly, but his moment of alarm disappeared the moment the rope around his right wrist was removed. He snatched one-handed at the food, shoveling it back into—

Stinging pain on his knuckles and a _crack_ made him drop the vegetable mush. He jerked away and froze as the edge of the knife pricked the skin above the metal collar.

“We aren’t savages to grab and finger our food,” Asa said coldly. “We are civilized; we use utensils. Pick up the fork.”

He breathed harshly through his nose for a moment, frustrated, but the knife meant business and so he fought the urge to reach for the food. He felt for the fork without daring to look down and picked it up, slowly, and held it awkwardly. The knife disappeared. Gingerly, he scooped some of the mush up; when no pain was forthcoming, he shoved it in his mouth.

It was very bland and the texture was unpleasant, but at the moment, it was wonderful. He hardly paused to chew it and simply gulped it down, already reaching for a second forkful. The second blow, as swift as the first, caused him to drop the fork to clatter on the plate before he succeeded.  

“That first bite was a reward for using a fork. Now, you must hold it properly before you may continue eating.”

He sat still for a long moment, trying to work out if this was something he knew. He looked at his grip, and it did not look right. _It’s a spoon, not a shovel_ echoed in his head and he switched the fork around so that he held it cupped in his palm. He received a noise of approval, and was allowed to eat the rest of the mush.

By the time it was gone, his fingers had remembered some skill of wielding forks. He unconsciously flipped the fork around to cut through the piece of meat with the side of the tines—and stopped. The mush had enabled him to think a little more clearly, now, and he remembered that using a fork like that hadn’t been—wasn’t?—considered good manners. After another moment’s hesitation, he set the fork down next to the plate and reached for the water instead.

Asa whipped his hand again, and he flinched and hissed. Asa’s knife dug into his throat as he tensed, ready to retaliate.

“If you wish to set your fork down in the middle of a meal with the intention of using it again, you may place it facedown on your plate with the end of the handle resting on the rim,” Asa instructed mildly. He waited, and when he made no move to correct the fork’s position, pressed on the knife until the blade broke the skin in a thin line.

He put the fork correctly on the plate.

“Very good,” Asa approved, and, after a few similarly…. enlightening moments more, he was allowed to sip—not gulp—the water, until his thirst was less fierce.

He did not want to ask for permission to cut the meat. In any case, the vegetable stuff had taken the harsh edge of his hunger, and though it was a meager portion, he was ready to stop eating—and also, get out of this parody of a lesson. At this point, much of his self-control was being used to actively ignore how upsetting the situation was, and even more to keep from thinking about himself specifically being the focus of the… training. His was not a destiny of good luck, though, and it held true now.

Asa insisted on his finishing the meal. This made it necessary to bring over the guard, who pinned his wrists to the chair arms while Asa reconfigured how his arms were restrained. After some difficulty, the ropes had been replaced by short-length chains long enough for him to reach the plate, but too short to have any real range.

“The Continental style is sufficient for our needs here,” Asa remarked. He had no idea what he was referring to, but he remembered that you switched hands and held the knife in your dominant hand and the fork in your other and somewhat how the grip was supposed to be. He felt the mush crawling back up his throat and forced it to stay down, and then he picked up and positioned the utensils as he remembered.

…It is hard to explain the act of desperate forgetting. To those with too much pride, an abundance of self-confidence, or those experiencing the rollercoaster identity-construction of puberty, there is _willful_ forgetting aplenty: a myriad of unpleasant, embarrassing, or humiliating experiences that get in the way of self-confidence and exertion of will, which are forcefully suppressed until lost to the vagaries of the human brain and egoism and only brought to light when a world is shattered by earthshaking reversal of circumstances or absolute betrayal.

Desperate forgetting is not that kind of forgetting. Desperate forgetting is like… it is like… like a map from a traveler, one who faithfully records their journeys and their impressions of those paths and landmarks, the memories of discovering these things in whatever medium they work best in—images, words, technical renderings. When she or he finishes this map, they calmly raise a pistol to their temple and pull the trigger.

Though the skull shatters and blood and bone and brain are everywhere, the map emerges unscathed. It is a ghost account of inapplicable emotions that were once felt, but no matter how incredibly detailed or intricately rendered that map is, the now-headless traveler cannot understand it; he or she cannot comprehend the exact meaning of the words or the nuances of the shading and can only approximate. It is a record with no connection for the headless traveler. It is an accurate account; anyone can navigate with it easily. However, the headless traveler does not _know_.

But that is not the true, awful problem.

The real problem, Max thinks—

(and he hears his own voice echoing disembodied in his head, dying off in the crevices of his skull and clashing with his heart beating through his blood)

—is that, the headless traveler is not dead. He is wandering the world, blood as permanently wet and bone as forever fresh as the day it exploded, until well-meaning or ill-meaning people fucking well jam every lump of brain into some sort of roundish thing and piece his goddamned bloody skull back together around it like that sodding children’s egg rhyme Humpty Dumpty, and had more collective, cursed success than all the King’s horses and all the King’s men.

It _hurts_. God, does it hurt. The memories well up, sinister seepage in a dyke where there is no apocryphal little Dutch boy to plug the leak with a finger. Things that were frozen long, long ago—things from the birth of the Wasteland and the death of Before—the things that he could not afford to remember, i.e. _everything_ —they come, they come all day and all night and he _cannot bear it._

“Otho,” a voice says chidingly and something cracks across his hands, “you are not paying attention.”

He doesn’t want to pay attention. The voice brings pain and sickness with its ceaseless demands. It reminds him—

— _Must you, Max?_

_The table is small and round and plain; square-cut legs with attractive notches near the top and graceful curves that abstractly suggest feet give it simple elegance, and the white coat of paint makes it homey. Two blue placemats make a pleasing backdrop to the cheap white ceramic plates with twinned, thin blue lines around the rims. Her knife and fork are poised elegantly over the chicken at her place, in contrast with the way he forcefully see-saws his fork single-handedly into acting as a knife._

_What? he asks innocently. This is a game they have shared since they first moved in together._

_Your napkin, Max, she huffs, looking at him with an expression anyone else would find foreboding. He sees the way the corners of her eyes cant upwards in amusement and knows better—_

Water smashes into his face and makes him gasp. The slaver, Asa, of the… whatever… of Aiaia… it is in the Wasteland. It is in the Wasteland and Emma is long dead, and she was _nothing_ like Asa, he doesn’t know why he reminds him of her now and the horror at even making a connection between them leaves him breathless.

“Cover your mouth,” Asa snaps, distantly, but it isn’t the cold that has him striving for breath because he has been frozen since he has been dragged down into this place. The ridiculously fragile-seeming fork and knife dropped haphazardly over the plate and the placemat are what has struck him down. He sees Emma’s face and relives the sickening lurch of knowing he remembers her because of this man, not for her own sake, and— _she’s gone, she’s dead, they’re all dead, why do you even try??—_

_you never even mourned—_

XV.

It is a week before he learns how to not be the person eating at Asa’s table. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A general note-- I'm still working on another fanfic, so I'm going to be trying to update each one at a time (though they will probably not be written that way). Because of that, I may update in a few days... or I may update in a week. Nevertheless, there will be updates!
> 
> A few things:
> 
> 1\. I'm just randomly picking names here for these pseudo-canonical characters; they may change if they are canonically released. I'm just sorta feeling this out, here. Also, the 'Otho' thing is just Asa's name for Max because it's not like Max ever tells anyone anything......
> 
> 2\. Continental style refers to (from my American point of view) the practice of cutting a bite and eating it while your fork is still in your left/non-dominant hand. American style etiquette demands that the diner cuts the bite with the knife in the dominant hand, before setting down the fork, switching the cutlery between the hands, and _then_ eating the bite. You of course switch it all around for a second bite. This style was developed back somewhere between the colonial and pioneering ages in America, when it was decided by the highbrows that Americans in general were so crass that they would not take the time to chew their food properly between bites unless there was some impediment to them eating several bites in a row (this is quite likely a myth--it's the tale I heard when I was little and I'm sticking to it!)
> 
> 3\. I will admit that I have only loosely sketched the points/aspects of PTSD I want to explore in this fanfiction out. The scientists were one, this nasty fellow is another, and there will be at least one more; and then I'll get to the actual... you know... recovery part. And then there will be an end! So we've got a good long way still before us.


	6. a city

(XVI.)

The ruins are sprawling; rubble is everywhere. It has been picked over by band after band of Wasteland denizens over the years as the walls wore away in the sand storms. The section he’s in is bordered by a plain splotched with rust stains and roughened by rocky debris with stones sometimes the size of his fist. Every so often, the remains of tattered and misshapen plastic bags flap from underneath crumbling junk piles.

He finds a rodent after some hours of exploration, further in from the edge. It has five legs and tastes sweet, once he strips the fur from it. (He doesn’t mind scales, but hair gives things an unpleasant texture.)

It is gloriously warm in the Wasteland. It is easy to walk lightly under the blazing sun; he can feel the heat of the baked earth and rock through the soles of his boots as he wanders through alleys of twisted, toppled skyscrapers. The weight of his heavy canvas jacket feels nice as he wears it open, with the light wind whistling through cracked brickwork to tug it this way and that.

He arrived at the ruins mid-morning, and was too interested to pass it by. This had been a large city, once. He might have been there Before, and it doesn’t hurt to prod at those fuzzy memories, but he can’t really recall anything specific about it other than he had only come through once or twice. There were lots of lights, lots of people. It had been something for business.

He has no doubt about whether there are people here or not. Sometimes, the pipelines for water or sewage were salvageable; sometimes the water pipelines dried up or broke deep underground, years ago, and the clumps of humanity had dispersed accordingly. There was glass and metal in abundance, in various forms, and wiring for electrical systems, and plastics of all sorts. Anyone who lives in the Wasteland can turn these scraps into something else, or trade those resources with other groups. This city is large, and while he does not know how many people live in its shadows, he knows they are there.

He hasn’t really come across anything hinting at a present population. Some tracks down an old boulevard, which had a track cleared between the debris that was narrow enough that a small car would have trouble getting through without scraping off the side mirrors is the only sign so far, but it goes for quite a way into the heart of the city, and it is deserted.

There are plenty of places to hide should anyone approach. Buildings on their sides or tumbled over show a plethora of sheltering nooks. Broken basement windows reveal dark spaces, dank, and frequently choked with trash. Squeaking can be heard in several, and have the musky, moldy smell of rodent; he can catch something for another snack, easily.

An opening catches his eye. It is an old entrance, one that used to have glass doors; the smooth, matte steel that would have made up the frames, doorjamb, and lintel are dull and spotted in rust. He’d be surprised that no one had looted the metal before, but there was a lot of metal still lying around in this area; probably, it was rarely visited. There is a lot of faded paper stuck to a wall with faint lettering and outlines of images. The cracked-yet-cohesive cement lintel over the doorframes has PUBLIC LIBRARY imprinted on it. There is trash right inside the door, but it is the kind of trash that is swept into piles tucked into the lee of objects, moved by wind. The dirt is thick and unmarked on the floor.

He goes in. (There isn’t any reason to it, really. Whim is a nice thing in the Wasteland, when it isn’t involving crushing other people.) There is a sense of… a remembrance of community—Before community—that is undemanding and pleasant. The industrial carpet has long since been ruined. It cushions his feet oddly nevertheless. A second set of double-doors hang cracked a few meters inside. The architecture had something to do with the AC, he remembered. He goes through them.

The air is musty and close. He pauses and takes the time to prop one of the doors open, using a broken cinderblock from just outside the entrance, before exploring further.

A long, empty desk with a lone jar of plastic pens stands on the left. He gets close and looks over the counter; two computer terminals lie on the floor, screens cracked and plastic casing still recognizable. More pens are scattered across the lower level of the desk, and three paperback books are stacked to one side. The block of paper that makes them up is browned all around the edges.

He can see the dim outlines of stacks. The light rarely (if ever) penetrated this far inside, and the signage on the ends of the shelves is still legible. The section closest to him is FICTION, W-Z. The shelves following are the rest of the fiction section, abutting the LITERATURE section.

He goes from row to row, working out titles and long-dead authors on the spines. The covers are still fairly bright; colors he forgot existed beyond subtle, natural highlights are dazzling even in the gloom. He pulls some out and lets the pages slip softly from one to another in fans of sweetly scented old paper, thhhhhhping contentedly back and forth.

Several shelves were emptied at one point; several shelves are nothing but books ruined by the trickling drip of busted air conditioning vents or leaks. Others house books latticed with the attentions of rats and mice and other creatures. Some of the books—the ones that were old when the library was still used—are so fragile that their pages fragment in his hands.

He pauses as he goes through the Classics subsection in Literature when a book with a stylized Greek warrior on a white cover comes into his hands. _The Odyssey_ , he reads, and _Homer_. It’s paperback, and the pages are still relatively all right; they don’t crumble to bits at a touch.

The faintest sense of something small tugging at his jacket sleeve prompts him to read aloud from where he’s absently skimmed through the first half. “As we two sat talking and weeping—” he pauses at the horrible hoarseness of it, and clears his throat before continuing. “—thus sadly with one another, the ghost of Achilles came up to us with Patroclus, Antilochus, and Ajax…”

(XVII.)

_…the Hall light is dim. He is seated on the dais, at the foot of the thrones. The gilded chains do not glitter very well in this light, but his clothes take the form of multiple layers and are uncomfortable anyway. The warmth he feels is from the constant, gentle burn of tension beneath his skin._

_He sips from the cup in his hand. He had some food a while ago, and there is a peculiar feeling of hollowness to him that may or may not be hunger. This is something strong. It tastes acrid and strips the feeling from his tongue. If he drinks enough of it, he will forget about the hollowness and the dread._

_The man grips the back of his neck in a familiar way. It feels bad; his skin crawls from sheer aversion. There is a weird awareness the hand, very warm and slightly damp, incites. He feels like something is stalking him._

_The man says something. He answers with an acceptable pattern of speech. The stone is rough enough for him to scrape sore lines into the fingers of his left hand if he rubs them against a particular ridge enough._

_...“He sleeps alone at night,” she whispers to him as she helps him dress, as she has for as long as he remembers in this place. It is so faint the guards, who have grown lax in their attendance, do not hear._

_“He will request you soon,” he tells him, less of breath passing lips and more of lips shaping sounds._

_The light is unchanging as he is led—followed—sometimes he cannot tell the difference, when he does not allow any sense of feeling to breathe—he is let into a room with an elaborate, ornate bed. The man is there, reading a book. He ignores them until the guards leave; the quiet snap of a shutting book shatters the silence—_

There are voices coming from outside the entrance of his hiding place. They are relaxed; one comment brings a round of quiet laughter. The group has the voices of men and women.

He unfreezes slowly and awkwardly—the ridges of the book dig sharply into his side as he moves into a more mobile position. He fell asleep on top of it. He takes a moment to tuck it securely into one of his jacket pockets before creeping towards the small opening.

It is late, very late. The moon is on the other side of the sky. It is waning, but at three-quarters; there are no clouds to obscure it, either. The entrance looks out over a small side street—he’s on what would have constituted a second floor, the building sheared just above it. It was accessible only by scaling a precariously-shifting pile of rubble and a crazily-leaning streetlight.

There is a group of—he counts the shifting silhouettes—fourteen. They all appear youngish. A flame catches—light flares—he can see a man carefully tending the flame with torn pages in hand and a book in the other, and knows where the empty shelves have ended up. Now, though, he sees that they are all under the age of thirty—possibly twenty-five. A group for scavenging or hunting, then.

He sees Nux with them. Nux, who was only a child—a boy, whose awareness of the world was shaped by the power vested in war and an omnipresent sense of mortality. Nux sits, slender and straight, and laughs with Capable before the fire. Three others walk in front of them, and the pair are gone when they pass. He would have liked to see that, he thinks, but that is not how the Wasteland works.

He sits in the entryway with Maggie and intently watches as the group moves mutedly around the tiny fire. Someone props spits with small animals and he can smell the meat roasting from his perch. They are shared between the people, and when they are gone, there is a brief moment of activity as the remains of the meal are cleared away.

Someone sings; a woman with a deep voice. After a few moments, several others join in. It is beautiful.

“We could join them,” Maggie whispers to him after a while. He shakes his head in a silent rejection. “But you’re crying,” she persists. “Why’re you crying? Maybe they can help you.”

He doesn’t know why. He can’t stop watching them, but it is unbearable. It taunts him, this thing he can never have. It hurts all the more to have it ripped away.

He was happy once. There was a life where things were easy, where he was on the side of right and it did not cost him to be so. When there were people for him. A family (his family). But the losing was terrible; the realization he was nothing better than the ones who did it bit deep into his heart. He is not worthy, and none of his searches for redemption ever solve things. His few acts for the interests of others are not, in the end, worth a tremendous amount—people still die, families are still crushed. He can never, ever prevent this, and he will never ever be able to do so. He cannot fix that which is broken, and certainly not himself.

Only black thoughts haunted him through the night. As the sun rose in a fiery, sickening pink, he skulked in the shadows of the destroyed room and hated the people, hated the ungovernable convulsions and emotions.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> unreliable narrator, yoooooooooo
> 
> this floats hazily somewhere between the last chapter and the next chapter. time in a world where time is not ruled every hour of the day is time that is totally meaningless.


	7. Greensleeves

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _What child is this?_   
>  _who laid to rest,_   
>  _on Mary's lap is sleeping..._

XVIII.

Two days later he sees smoke billowing into the sky, ugly and black.

He is able to see it from the ridge he is on, overlooking a twisting wadi—the remains of a river. Here, south of the old city, the land is jagged and rough and difficult to drive in. But there are ways.

He debates the merits of scavenging. Whatever oil there might have been looks to be unusable. His car will need parts. There could be tools. There could also be the ones who did this _fire, fire and blood and the shock of his knife as he slits someone’s throat and slides it between Furiosa’s ribs_ and he is apprehensive about fighting them when he knows nothing of their strength or numbers.

The last is solved in short order. The wadi disgorges a trio of motorcycles and a truck that whoop and cheer as they continue nor’ east. The truck is loaded with scraps already, it appears, and possibly a human. He cannot see from this distance.

Something is burning, though. With only one truck, the others may have had to leave things behind. Maybe it hasn’t all burned yet.

He drives as close as he can to the smoke without entering the wadi. Eventually the sides rise steep and impassable as it deepens, and he cannot reasonably drive any farther and still find a way in. He backtracks until he finds a bank that is shallow enough to use as a ramp. The treads of the others’ vehicles in the empty riverbed are clearly visible as he noses through the sometimes-narrow passage.

There is a spring. It appears to be an oasis. The water is a disturbing shade of green, but there are some struggling weeds and two surprisingly large trees capped in spikey fronds that testify to how potable it is. One appears to have some sort of fruit. He wonders if it is edible.

The burning thing is a small shack. The roof is completely gone, a few scraps of smoking fronds testifying to it having being thatched. The walls are scavenged auto parts. It is mostly what is inside that is on fire now.

Next to the shack is the skeleton of a vehicle. It looks like the ones who came raiding dismantled much of it. He heads immediately to the hulk to see what is left. He has barely taken a look inside when there is a loud crash from the hut. He whips around just in time to see a ragged creature come stumbling out, soot-black and hacking.

It is a child. It freezes when it sees him. He stares at it, equally still, until he realizes he is holding his knife defensively between them. The child has been crying. Slowly, he tosses his knife to the side and shows his open palms.  

“Is—anyone else?” he asks, flicking his eyes over to the blaze.

There is another loud crash. An ominous whine goes up, and then there is a small explosion. The child flinches away from the hut with an upset noise and skitters into the pool.

He keeps his distance, steps back to compensate for the child’s movement. He—or she—is clearly in shock; it sinks into the water and starts to cry again.

He does not think there is much time. Others may come looking for the cause of the smoke, particularly if this is contested or unclaimed territory. Perhaps others from wherever the raiders originated will come to form a more permanent guard. An oasis with good water is a valuable resource.

He moves back towards the wrecked car, slowly. If the child bolts—well, it probably wouldn’t matter. But even in the Wasteland, children are precious. He is reluctant to scare it any more than it has already been.

He leaves the child to shiver in the spring and picks over the wrecked vehicle. There are some smaller parts that he could make useful, and he removes them. Making a wide circle around the child, he dumps them into the back seat of his car. He can work on fixing it up later in a safer place.

He pulls out the various jugs and bottles that serve to hold water and sets them at the edge of the spring farthest from the child. If the plants can survive on this water, so can he. He drains the remainder of the bottle he has been rationing, and starts filling and capping everything without a leak.

At the third vessel, small hands are offered. The child has crept closer. He hands over the jug and the child screws on the appropriate top. In no time, they have a system going.

“Who are you?” it croaks two bottles later. It begins to cough again, and hacks into one arm while doing its best to keep the uncapped vessel from spilling.

He steadies the bottle with one hand until the coughing eases and the child spits black gunk into the water. The words stick in his throat, but he pushes them out anyway. It’s not like names matter much to children, not in how they depend on the person more than the idea. “Max,” he says. “My name’s Max.”

“Where’re you from?”

“Nowhere.” He fills the last jug. “You?”

“Here,” the child whispers. It doesn’t say with whom, or why.

She stands quietly behind the child and looks at it thoughtfully. He avoids her gaze as he hands over the vessel and stands up to begin ferrying the water to his car. The child watches him as he works.

“Got anywhere to go?” he asks as he picks up the last. The child shakes its head silently. He grunts.

He’s stripped the wreck and replenished his water… he points to the tree with the fruit. “What’re those?”

The child cants its head to the side. Between the dunking and the coughing, most of the soot and ash has been washed off; its features are delicate, face is tan, eyes some pale color. The hair is still too dirty to know. “Mama called them dates.”

“They any good?” The question is irrelevant. If they are edible, he will take some. Food is food.

The child nods solemnly. It appears to have calmed down, or at least tired itself out, and it is no longer crying.

He stows the last bottle. The tree is maybe four meters in height. He climbs it quickly, the rough bark biting into his hands. The fronds feel just short of sturdy and creak worryingly, but he can spread his weight out on two or three of them with the right footing and it seems to be all right. He hacks down the fruit clusters with his other knife and lets them fall to the ground.

The last few fruit clusters are out of his reach, but most of them are on the ground. He puts his knife away and slides down the trunk.

The child is already collecting the loose fruits, holding them in the front of its shirt. He hooks the large fruit clusters with his fingers and carries them to the car. They are surprisingly heavy. These also go in the back seat. He retrieves the knife he dropped earlier.

The child stands under the tree with the shirt front full of fruit, looking at him uncertainly as he opens the door to the driver’s side.

“Be careful, Max,” she warns him, standing behind the child. “What if she winds up dead like me?”

He grips the door tightly and jerks his head over towards the passenger side. “You coming?”

XIX.

The child is nothing like her.

For one thing, the child looks different. Cleaned up, the child has dark brown hair that can’t make up its mind about being straight or wavy, and its eyes are pale green. Maybe seven years old. She seems certain that the child is a girl, but so far, he cannot actually tell. Right now, the child is curled up in the passenger seat back against the door, keeping an eye on him. It is not what she used to do.

Max considers his options. The first, obviously, is abandoning the child elsewhere, but he doubts the child knows much about surviving in the Wasteland and immediately rejects it. The second is to find a safe settlement in the area and leave the child there, but he does not know of any safe settlements here and does not feel inclined to test the hospitality of other marauders. He decides to go with the second option, with the acknowledgement that it is possible that it will take more than a few days to find a safe settlement.

“What’s her name?” she asks in his ear.

It’s easier to remember how to speak comprehensibly, but not by much. “What’s your name?” he asks the child.

“Ven,” it says, wary. “Venetia.”

It sounds feminine, so he guesses Maggie is right.

They ride. Silence reigns in the cabin. The sun reaches its zenith and passes it; soon after, he reaches behind his seat and hands her some dates.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was originally vaguely intended to be the second chapter, but that was nixed in favor of actual story... -telling arc shit. Sorry about the shortness!


	8. Ven

XX.

Maggie hums smugly when Max can get no information from Ven about her parents, or whomever she lived with, or if she’d ever been anywhere else. Her mouth forms a trembling line when she blinks away tears, and he leaves off trying to find out.

A week passes.

XXI.

Their pace is slow. By the evening, they have gone over at least thirty kilometers of rugged, rocky terrain, for which his vehicle should really be riding on some sort of high-suspension-big-wheels arrangement in order to keep the undercarriage from scraping its guts out, but he sweats it out and promises himself that the first thing they will do when they’re free of the raiders’ territory is jack the car off the ground so that he can get under it for a proper look. As the shadows slant long and the sun dims, Max decides on camping in a shallow depression edged by rock on one side. It should keep them from obviously sticking out to the casual observer, but still give them enough of a heads-up that they _won’t get caught asleep again, can’t get caught don’t want the Master—_

“Max?”

He becomes aware that he’s gasping, an odd hoarse rattle. His hands are clenched so tightly around the steering wheel that all the tendons stand out and his knuckles are white. He has strange, double vision; he can see the desert in front of him, but his mind hardly seems to register it, overlaying the present with blood-scented memories of a dark night.

Something touches his chin clumsily, and he startles and he blinks and then blinks again, until the only thing he sees is what is currently in front of him.

The desert is outside the front of the windshield. He is clutching the steering wheel so that the stiffened leather creaks. Ven is leaning awkwardly over the gear stick, holding the nearly-full bottle of water that they had sipped throughout the afternoon to ease the sweetness of the dates. She can’t hold it easily with both hands because she needs one to balance, being so small, but it is heavy enough to make her arm shake from the effort of keeping it up so high one-handed. He takes the bottle without thinking about it, no effort at all, and looks at it in confusion.

“Mama did that sometimes,” she says, matter-of-factly, already edging back towards the door as he continues to stare. “We put wet clothes on her forehead while she lay down and helped her drink water so she didn’t dehy—dehydrate.”

Suddenly, he is tired. He drinks some of the water sparingly, small mouthfuls at a time and thinks very hard of nothing but the feel of the liquid sliding down his throat.

“Thank you,” he says when he feels less dead. It makes him pause, but he guesses some things like teaching good manners to small children are ingrained. He hands the bottle back to Ven, who caps it and twists in her seat to put it in the back.

He collects his thoughts after a few more moments of sitting quietly, and then he gets out. He scans the horizon. He sees nothing. Then, with a burst of inspiration, he leans back down to talk to Ven, who has not moved.

“Come, help me,” he says, motioning with his hand to indicate _out here, come out._ She gets the idea and scrambles out her door. “Can you keep watch?” he asks. If he stumbles, she doesn’t seem to care much. “Cars. Others.” He points to the small outcropping of rock. “Up there.”

She nods, and in a trice she is flattening herself against the rock. Someone taught her how to stay out of sight; it is good to know.

He gets to work, quickly pulling out his tools and jacking the car up enough that he can slide under it and take a look at its workings. The inspection is brief. There are plenty of scrapings and scratches, but no important hoses or lines have been severed. Nothing smells like leaking gasoline. He can’t do much for the former except mark it as needing possible repair work in the near future.

He is out and lowering the vehicle within ten minutes. It is getting too hard to see, but he can still find Ven easily and crawls up next to her where she’s blending into the landscape.

“Anything?” he asks her, quietly.

“Dust,” she says, and points to the horizon to the north of the way they came. There are two cloudy spots in the sky behind the jagged hills; probably scouting parties, or raiding parties. They’re not large enough for anything more serious, be it a war party or a sand storm. Of course, they could be something else, but he still hasn’t seen any herds of beasts roaming the Wasteland and so he doubts that that is the cause.

He hums under his breath. They won’t be able to see them easily until the sun rises, at this rate, and they are far away. The area here is not soft sand, so their trail will not be detected by the casual observer. If he drives through the night, he will need his lights to see the rough ground, and that would be a dead giveaway.

“Safe for tonight,” he tells her, motioning for her to follow him, and slides back down to the car. He gives her more dates. He doesn’t really have anything else edible in the vehicle, and the smaller animals have all disappeared with the sun. They eat together in silence, next to the car. He takes the time to scribble markings on his current scrap-map, noting the oasis in the wadi, and adds hatch marks to indicate bad terrain.

It is after the sun has set but before the stars have become visible that he notices Ven is shivering. It’s very subtle, and she is hugging close to the car for any latent warmth of being sunbaked all day. He thinks he has a blanket, or at least a towel; maybe neither, but he remembers having some sort of cloth bundle in the back. He digs around for it and comes up with a checkered square of cloth, maybe two meters long and wide and tied off with fringe on two sides. He folds it into a triangle and drapes it over her shoulders without comment.

“Thanks,” she whispers a minute later when the shivering eases.

Even so, they are in a desert. The temperature drops precipitously in the night; the change can be as drastic as fifteen degrees*, he remembers. The point where the cold drops beyond comfort level usually occurs a few hours after midnight, and will keep you up until well after day breaks from sheer discomfort. This is, of course, the point at which he is woken, a few hours later; sound sleep, for once, and so instead of blindly swinging he merely blinks at Ven’s small silhouette.

“It’s cold,” she tells him, with the edge of frustration that borders on tears common in anyone under nine years of age. “I can’t sleep.”

He thinks for a moment. “C’mere,” he says, and wriggles a little to the side. “But—if I—have nightmares, don’t shake me.”

“Do you have bad nightmares?” she asks, curling into his space with the entitlement of childhood.

“Yes,” he says.

She is quiet a moment. “I dreamed of fire earlier,” she says, as if imparting a great secret. “Papa told me never to talk about bad dreams ‘cause Mama didn’t have nice ones either.”

“Fire dreams are bad,” he mumbles to her, half asleep again already. He has bad dreams about fire, but right now sleep muddles with his brain and he doesn’t get trapped in a horror cycle of memory.

She takes several minutes of wriggling before she dozes off in a comfortable position up against him. He doesn’t stay awake much longer than her.

XXI.

The morning is painful in its brilliance. It is a sky free of clouds and sandstorms, but now there are more dust columns on the horizon. They number five in all, and span from the north of their position to the nor’east. Most are still behind those distant ridges, but at least one is traversing the area beyond them.

Fortunately, the unknown convoy is on lower ground than their campsite. The land has a gradual slope with tumbled scree everywhere; the peak of the slight hill is close to them. He watches the dust cloud move until he can determine that they are not continuing west as he might hope, but are coming towards their direction. To stay means certain discovery. If they can cover all the parts of the vehicle that reflect the light, it is possible that, by moving slowly enough not to kick up a lot of dust, they can get away undetected.

Quickly, he works with Ven to wrap every spare rag they have over the unpainted bumpers and grills. They wrap the side mirrors and use some of their precious water to mix mud to cake on the bits left over when they’re out of spare cloth and leather. She is fast to pick up the idea and a clever worker, deft in tying the difficult short ends in particular. It takes them all of fifteen minutes to get this done and then they are easing out of the depression, heading south.

He goes slowly, so as not to kick up a dust cloud, and hopes that the rusted tan body of the vehicle is enough to camouflage them from this distance. Ven watches the landscape and the view in the rearview mirror, the only one left uncovered, until she apparently gets bored of this and pulls some dates from the back seat. She gives him some and nibbles on the rest. He has no appetite, but he eats them anyway.

They crest the hill within an hour. He keeps the same snail pace over the ridge; sending up dust clouds now would be the height of stupidity. For the next two hours, they crawl. When they hit lowland again, he picks up the pace.

Around midday, they spot dust in front of them. Promptly, he slows, and turns west. It is tense for a while, or at least it is for him; the thought of being hunted makes his skin crawl, and he tastes dirt more acutely than usual. They’re going off-map now, south of territory he’s been through before, but not in territory he’s gone through yet. Ven naps in the seat; Maggie hums children’s rhymes. It’s almost soothing, except for the general uncertainty.

The dust disappears from his rearview mirror three hours later. This is around when he stops so that he and Ven can take the time to relieve themselves, conveniently near some scrubby cover so that she has some excuse of privacy when she goes. He makes sure to be out of sight below the waist, but not far enough that he cannot hear if something unexpected happens.

Predictably, Ven screams.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've started my final student teaching-- updates will be slow :( I'm sorry! The school I work at means I start my day at 5:30 and teach unhappy teenagers starting at 7:20 :((( I AM A NITE OWL I AM NOT MADE FOR THIS
> 
> *Degrees here being in Celsius, not Fahrenheit; I live in a desert in California and can attest that it will frequently go from 99 to 69 F (or lower) in the span of 24 hours.


	9. company

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a short one-- sorry about that :/ Life is nuts! I'll try to get the next chapter done and posted within the month :)

XXII.

He’d barely done up his fly, so his hand is conveniently near his knife and he wastes no time in yanking it out. He barrels through the scrub, ignoring the whippy tendrils that catch and pull on his clothes and scratch his skin.

His world narrows. He can see Ven, shrinking backwards; the threat is two raggedy individuals, tall and menacing. One, shorter, is reaching out though Ven is too far, and the other is turning to look behind them. Are there others? Possibly; eliminate after incapacitating the immediate threat. He is between them and Ven.

The tall man whirls back around and shouts when he sees him. His knife handle catches him in the delicate junction of jaws, below his right ear, and he drops like a stone. He turns to face the small man, who is—

—not a man—

—he shifts his aim just enough that the blade tears through cloth instead of ripping through flesh. He freezes on the downswing, not trusting his instincts to behave properly. The boy—he is approaching adolescence—has frozen in the act of taking a step back around a strangled yelp. He looks at him like he is about to faint.

He does faint. Max feels bad about that.

“Okay?” he barks at Ven, who is cringing. Her ragged trousers are around her ankles and she is streaming tears. She flinches and pulls them up as fast as she can with hands that shake, and shrinks in on herself again.

“No,” he hears himself say. “No, it’s all right. Shhhhh. I won’t—”

There are loud crashing noises. He jerks the knife back upright and moves to intercept the source before it gets to Ven, but stays defensive. Terrifying slaver-lords don’t have prepubescent boys on their front lines, and he doesn’t want to delve into that judgment of whether or not the Master would even want that kid—

A woman comes crashing through holding an axe. She sees the man and the boy on the ground, the first stirring feebly and the second white as a sheet and unmoving. Her eyes take on a wild look.

“Shit,” he says to himself, and pulls out his gun.

The woman, about to charge at him, stops.

“Sorry,” he says, words thick. It’s harder to talk to adults than children, for some reason. “Sorry—misunderstanding.” He slowly holds the gun up and flicks the safety, holding the knife out wide, out of a defensive stance. When the woman still doesn’t move, he straightens and tucks the gun away, holds the knife down by his side. He edges backwards towards Ven.

The woman doesn’t break eye contact, but she does lower her axe a bit and creeps closer to the man and the boy.

“Hey,” Max says quietly to Ven, taking a chance to glance at her once he’s standing just slightly in front of her. She’s doesn’t move and she’s still crying. “Hey,” he repeats, and telegraphs his movements so that she is not surprised when he puts his hand on her left shoulder and edges her closer.

That gets a reaction; he hears half of a sob before she’s holding tightly to his leg and burying her face in his thigh. He moves his hand to her head and cups the back of it, more from muscle memory than from thought.

“What’d you do to my son?” the woman asks from his side of the clearing. Her voice is tight; she is restraining herself.

“Nothing,” Max says, back to keeping an eye on her. The man is sitting up looking pretty dazed; the woman is crouching next to the boy with a hand to his forehead. “Scared him. My mistake—sorry.”

“S’all right,” the man says loudly, slurring, then clutches at his head and continues more quietly. “’d do th’ same.”

“What happened?” the woman hisses, reaching out to steady him. She hooks her fingers into the slice Max tore out of the kid’s shirt. “What is this?”

He strokes Ven’s hair and edges the leg she’s holding to indicate that he wants to start moving back to the car and away from the family. She’s still squeezing pretty hard, though, and doesn’t seem to notice.

“We scared the little girl. Sorry, honey!” the man calls, loud again. “’er dad comes running up. But Brandt’s okay, isn’t he?”

The woman looks sour, mouth twisting. “He’s still out.”

“Didn’t touch him,” Max grunts when she glares at him. Unappeased, she fingers the hole again and dares him to contradict this evidence. “Fainted.”

Now the boy is stirring, brought around, no doubt, by the woman’s coaxing. He holds Venetia’s head against his thigh and resigns himself to waiting as first the boy whimpers, and then cries when he opens his eyes again. The woman hushes him and croons.    

The other man gets to his feet slowly, clearly expecting to overbalance and fall, as wobbly as he is. His hand tightens on the knife’s hilt. He has taken them by surprise; they must not be working with anyone, or more people would have come when Ven screamed.

“They’re trying to get past, too,” the man was saying. “Maybe they can help—”

“No,” the woman interrupts sharply. “I will not—”

“Get past what?” Max asks. There is something in their tone that sounds like foreboding. If he were any less ready for a fight, he might find humor in the inevitable voice of Fate belling at him.

“The riders over there,” says the man, waving to the direction he and Ven had come from.

“The Reavers—Renders—or whatever they claim to be,” the woman adds bitterly; there is grief in her eyes. She has had dealings with these riders before.

The boy spots him and shrinks back into his mother. His hand tightens against Ven’s head, but remembers at the last moment to be wary of her hair and forcibly relaxes it.

The man walks across the strip of undetermined territory between them and him, hand held out. He must have been raised by parents who lived in the time Before, or parents of parents, or… whatever. He can’t even recall how many years had gone by, at this point; for all he knows, this man was as old as he is. He takes the hand and shakes it, bemused.

“I’m Jens,” the man says by way of introduction. “This is my—wife, Gyle, and our son, Brandt. You?”

“Max,” Max says reluctantly. He gestures slightly to Ven when Jens lets go of his hand, and states “Ven.”

“She’s yours? She’s beautiful,” Jens says to him, and crouches down to be on Ven’s level. He addresses her directly. “Hello Ven, I’m Jens. I’m very sorry we scared you.”

Ven peeps out a little from behind his leg. “Hi,” she says in a small voice.

“Would you mind if we make it up to you?” Jens asks her, voice gentle. Max sees Gyle glaring again; she is somehow more understandable at this moment. In the Wasteland, it does not pay to be charitable. “Come, have dinner with us. We have some sugar, and I’m sure you haven’t had that in a long time.”

“What’s sugar?” Ven asks him, and somehow includes Max when she loosens her grip and looks up at him.

“It’s good,” he tells her gravely. He does not say that the company of these people may not be worth the sugar. They’ll find out, soon enough.


End file.
